Fox Continues to Dominate; Critics Can’t Handle It
Item: Fox News’s Ailes says he’s just getting started (HT Rich Noyes at NewsBusters) –
Firing poison darts at his cable-news competitors and taunting his critics in the media, Fox News Channel boss Roger Ailes celebrated the 10th birthday of his network but instead of cake, served notice that his conquest of other television empires already is under way…… Ailes made his comments during an appearance Monday evening before North American television critics, a hostile audience that generally makes no secret of its contempt for his network. Fox News panels here have often been something closer to hand-to-hand combat than to news conferences, and this one was no exception.
About two-thirds of the 150 critics left the room before Ailes took the stage, several of them openly voicing their scorn for what they say is Fox News’ conservative spin.
Instead, as Ailes gleefully reminded the critics, his network has led the cable news pack in the Nielsen ratings for the past 55 months and has more viewers than its competitors, CNN and MSNBC, combined.
”Fox News is doing pretty well,” Ailes said with a sly smile, noting that many of the critics who forecast the channel’s doom were ‘’sitting in their hotel rooms right now” instead of attending his news conference.
Item: Though rival CNN still gets an audience pickup in times of major international stories, Fox holds its own better than it ever has –
Middle East Crisis: Week of July 17 Ratings
“The 20 most-watched cable news programs last week, when the escalating hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah produced the biggest headlines, were on the Fox News Channel,” TV Week reports.
FNC’s primetime viewership last week, 1.9 million, was down “3 percent from the comparable week in 2005. But in the 25-54 demo, Fox was up 13 percent year to year with 586,000 viewers in prime time.”
CNN had big gains, but they came from a much smaller base.
Why is this happening? Here’s what Ailes said, noted at the first link above:
“Other cable news networks seem less interested in reporting the complicated politics of the crisis in Lebanon than in trying to embarrass the U.S. government, Ailes said. “One of my competitors spent three days on Cyprus trying to find somebody who didn’t like the government because the plane was four hours late and they didn’t get a candy bar in line,” he said, jabbing at a lengthy report by CNN’s Soledad O’Brien on the evacuation of U.S. citizens from Beirut. “I thought that was not where the story was.”
Fair, balanced, and now even nuanced. No wonder WORM (Worn-Out Reactionary Media, known to most as The Mainstream Media) critics can’t handle it.
